


Weaver

by foolishgold



Category: Bleach
Genre: Bleach deserved better 2kforever, Canon Rewrite, Character Study, F/M, Fix-It, Intrusive Thoughts, guilt complex, secondhand trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-15
Updated: 2016-12-23
Packaged: 2018-09-08 17:04:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8853235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foolishgold/pseuds/foolishgold
Summary: Inoue Orihime grows up.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Unofficially dedicated to mizulily on tumblr, who renewed my interest in this hellpit of a series and inspired me to finally take a serious shot at this writing thing. We'll see how it goes!

Inoue Orihime prays to her brother as soon as she gets home every single day.

She smiles and tells him all about her day. She tells him about her progress in school, about what she ate for lunch, about her classmates, about her friends. She talks about handicrafts club and mentions the quiet boy with glasses who is so amazing at sewing, but neglects to mention his chilly attitude. She talks about Tatsuki, carefully tiptoeing around her ever-growing skill and passion for karate. She talks about Kurosaki Ichigo, and never once breathes a word about the fights he’s always getting into - the fights he always, always wins - because people are so quick to judge him by his appearance. She doesn’t say anything about how loyally he defends his friend Sado, who is tall and strong and has such pretty dark skin, who is also frequently targeted for standing out. She talks about the new transfer student, Kuchiki Rukia, and how pretty and nice and funny she is, and how the girl seemed immediately very close to Kurosaki. How cool and impressive it is that the newest addition to their class can speak to him so freely. She does not share the vague, unsettling strangeness that follows Kuchiki, like the spectre of a hound nipping at her heels. Inoue Orihime carefully, quietly smooths down all the bumps and burrs and snags in her life, paints a pretty peaceful picture, and feeds it to her brother’s memory word by word.

Inoue Orihime feels like a dirty, wretched liar.

But what else is she supposed to do? She knows that she’s clumsy, spacey, forgetful. She knows that her mind isn’t always where it should be. She fears, more than anything, that if she doesn’t speak to her brother every single day she’ll get so caught up in the world of the living that he’ll vanish from her thoughts completely, and she’ll forget him. The last, intangible traces of the most important person in her life, vanishing like a rabbit into a magician’s hat.Poof. There is nothing in the world that terrifies her more. So she lies, and she paints pretty pictures, and she reassures herself over and over that this is the best she can do.

 

\---

 

One day she learns that the best intentions can have the most terrible consequences, unintended and unseen until it is far too late. She sees with her own eyes what the desperate, crushing ache of her own attachment has done to the person she holds dearest in her heart. It’s shackled him to the world of the living, trapped him, and driven him mad. He is a monster twisted into the utter antithesis of everything she has ever known him to be, all festering wounds of the heart, all hunger. His only recourse now is to lash out with violence. Worse, he turns that violence against Orihime, who holds him dearest in her heart, who he gave up so much in order to protect. For her brother, her Sora to have become this...it is a fate far more horrifying than she could have ever imagined.

In her mind’s eye she sees a journal fall to the floor, splayed open and covered in Sora’s handwriting. She feels so cold.

Orihime sees Kurosaki, dressed all in black and wielding a big silly sword like something out of a manga. She hears Kuchiki’s voice, too, but she doesn’t understand what she sees or hears. She can’t keep up with the chaotic battle tearing through her fundamental understanding of reality. Everything else is drowned out by the litany of my fault my fault my fault my fault playing in her head, jumping and skipping and uneven like playing a record with a deep, deep scratch. Kurosaki struggles and argues with the monster her brother has become, and all she can think about is that this is no longer her brother. In all her selfish desire to preserve what was left of him, in her own heart if nothing else, she has destroyed the person he used to be.

When Sora tears away from Kurosaki and launches himself toward her, she opens her arms wide and relishes the wet, grinding agony of his teeth sinking into her shoulder and abdomen. She wanted her words to be strong and clear but the best she can do is speak in a rough, rattling whisper through blood-speckled lips, confessing her crime. “I’m sorry. I was afraid that if I let you go I would be alone. No matter how many friends I make...no matter how close Tatsuki-chan and I are...no matter how much I like the people around me, eventually they have to go home, and I’m left here. Alone. So I didn’t want you to leave me, even after you died. I was so selfish. I tried so hard to make it better by showing you I was doing okay, that I was happy and having fun at school, so that you wouldn’t worry while you were watching over me.” She doesn’t understand why that tastes like a lie, just as the pretty pictures she’d painted had. She doesn’t have the strength to dwell on it now. She’s so very cold, and she can’t feel her hands tangled in his hair anymore, and her whispers are fading into nothing at all. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I love you.”

She has just enough time to say her goodbyes before the world goes silent and melts into darkness.

 

\---

 

The next day Orihime wakes feeling sick and sore and empty. She goes about her morning routine exhausted, trying to grapple with the two sets of memory taking up too much space in her mind. One is vague, sort of dreamlike but oddly flat and lifeless. Something about a sumo wrestler with a bazooka. The other, painfully clear and sharp, features Kurosaki and Kuchiki and a monster that was once Sora. She knows without a doubt which is real, but she can’t deny wishing with all her heart that the wrestler was truly the culprit responsible for the missing wall in her apartment. Thinking about the ordeal she actually experienced the previous night feels like having a waking nightmare, and she wants so badly to forget about it. Tatsuki walks to school with her just like always and brings up the fake memory, and Orihime is perfectly content to go along with it. She doesn’t want to talk about Kurosaki’s black clothes or Kuchiki’s stern guidance or her brother’s transformation. So she tucks it away and smiles through the day, random and silly and studious and completely normal. She prays that whatever the hell Kurosaki and Kuchiki are up to keeps its distance from their classmates until the end of the year at least but preferably forever and ever.

That prayer goes unheard.


	2. Chapter 2

Orihime is riding the train, heading home from running an errand, when she hears a young man make an off-color joke about her from scant feet behind her and his friend laughs along. She imagines half turning, reaching for him, and gently carding her fingers through his hair. She imagines gripping the tresses at the back of his skull as hard as she can and slamming his face into the window in front of her.

She takes shallow, quiet breaths through her nose and tries to swallow the shame and self-disgust that claws up her throat, sticky-hot and stinging like bile.

There are things that she has never told anyone about herself. Things that Tatsuki doesn’t know, that even Sora wasn’t aware of when he was alive. Chief among them is that she has a terrible temper.

Even as she tells herself that they’re barely older than her, they probably weren’t raised well, they were just being dumb boys, she thinks about how easy it would be to hurt them. She saw them walk past her at the terminal; they don’t move anything like Tatsuki or the rest of the karate club or even like Kurosaki. They expect nothing from her, would only laugh harder at the idea of her confronting them, and she has Tatsuki’s assurances of her secondhand strength and skill. Orihime has always been good with probability, and the odds that she could leave them both bleeding on the floor of the train without breaking a sweat are stacked pretty high.

She completely despises this side of herself, with a ferocity she’s certain goes beyond simply knowing that such unnecessary cruelty is wrong. She has thoughts like this pretty much every day, and each time they pop into her head they’re met with a gut reaction of utter revulsion. It’s a constant tug-of-war between her impulses and her inhibitions, and it’s exhausting.

At least keeping it secret isn’t so hard. When Tatsuki’s around all she has to do is stay still and not say anything. It usually ends before it begins, her best friend’s threats sincere enough to drive off all but the most persistent aggressors, and all Orihime has to do is smile and say she’s fine. Tatsuki may be good at reading her, for the most part, but when she’s distracted by her own indignation it’s a lot easier to slip stuff by her and change the subject.

As for Sora...well, no one had ever bothered her when he was around, so all she had to do was not tell him about what happened when he wasn’t. She wondered, sometimes, if he’d been able to see those thoughts, during that year after he’d died. When he’d watched over her, and listened to her prayers, and her chattering, and her pretty, poisonous pictures.

She really hoped not.

\---

When Sado comes to school covered in bandages, her anger flares without direction. She isn’t even completely sure who or what she’s angry at. Kurosaki and Kuchiki, for exchanging knowing looks as if his best friend being injured heralds the beginning of some secret mission? At whatever hurt Sado? Or, somehow, at Sado for somehow getting mixed up in Kurosaki and Kuchiki’s business with those creatures?

All Orihime wants to do is put it out of her mind but for the life of her she can’t stop thinking about it. Wondering.

Did whatever hurt Sado look like her brother had? Did his monster try to eat him too? Was it someone he had known and loved? Someone he unknowingly condemned? She doesn’t ask.

A few days later Kuchiki gives Kurosaki a thumbs up when he enters the classroom and he smirks back at her, silently triumphant. Sado’s wounds are suddenly gone.

As if that weren’t unsettling enough, something feels different about Sado. It takes three whole class periods for her to put her finger on it, but there’s something slightly heavier about the air around him. A faint pressure against her skin, like riding an elevator up to a higher floor. Then she realizes that Kuchiki feels the same way, and then that Kurosaki produces this effect far more so than either of them. Once it registers it’s like a slap in the face, a gravity well she’d walked right into and simply failed to notice until that moment. Like some goofy cartoon character walking off a cliff without falling, until they look down. She doesn’t even understand how she’s telling apart whose heaviness is whose.

She doesn’t ask about that either.

After school she goes to handicrafts club, and to her astonishment Ishida-kun has a similar feeling surrounding him. It’s subtler, pulled in closer to his skin, and she doesn’t feel it until she sits down beside him. Orihime whirls toward him, her mouth falling open, and starts to speak. “Ishida-kun, you-!” Halfway to panic, she claps a hand over her mouth and tries to remember how breathing is supposed to work. Then she realizes that pesky hand is in the way and it immediately drops into her lap. She begins stammering, unable to get more than two words out at a time, all her finesse for obfuscation abandoning her.

Ishida Uryuu looks at her, his expression cool and impassive. Just like that, he stares right through her for a full, agonizing minute while her tongue trips uselessly over her teeth. Right when she’s certain he’s going to demand to know what’s got her so worked up he abruptly looks away and pushes his glasses up. He says quietly “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

Her mouth closes so fast her jaw clicks. She watches him pick up his needle and thread it, getting to work on his project for the day. She swallows, bites her lip, fidgets with the fabric strewn across her own desk. Finally she replies, her voice barely above a whisper, “Thanks, Ishida-kun.”

“I’ve done nothing deserving of gratitude.” His tone is even and calm, but not cold.

It surprises a little giggle from her, something about it striking her as strangely gentle. She wonders if it’s not as new as she thinks. Maybe he’s been like that for a while now and, just like the mysterious riptide around Kurosaki, she simply never noticed before.

She thinks that would be kind of nice.


End file.
